Cloning 1 hard disk in a software RAID

[Liam Proven]

I have a degraded & rather unstable software RAID on my server. 1 disk
does not register at all any more & the md subsystem won't mount it as
being "stale". Another sometimes mounts but won't stay up for long.

And the drive with my backup of the contents has died. >_<

I have several spares, though. What I was considering doing was doing
a sector-level copy of the "iffy" drive onto a new replacement, which
I hope will give me a stable array, then adding a spare and hoping
that the s/w RAID subsystem will rebuild my array.

My plan was to remove the other 3 drives, pro tem, just connecting the
flakey one and a new disk, and doing something like

dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sde

to copy the whole of the unstable drive onto a new one.

Should this work, or is it a disastrously bad idea or something?

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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